We are very happy to welcome visiting Professor Hans Renders for a whole month at Aix-Marseille Université. Here is the programme for the upcoming sessions of the “Séminaire Biographie”, lecture and conference, all at ALLSH Faculty AMU, Aix-en-Provence

Pr Hans RENDERS

Hans Renders is Professor of History and Theory of Biography and Director of the Biography Institute (University of Groningen). He is also co-founder and Vice President of the Biography Society.

10 November 2016

by Nigel Hamilton

Historians have been skeptical about biography since they invented it. By the same token biographers have been skeptical of historians.

Plutarch, in his life of Alexander the Great, felt impelled to remind readers he was writing “biography not history.” Histories, he pointed out, often told nothing of a “man’s character,” focusing rather on the facts of whether or not he won his battles. In his life of Timoleon, Plutarch rhapsodized on the joy he experienced in writing biography – treating history as a kind of mirror in which he could “adorn my own life by imitating the virtues of the men whose actions I have described. It is as though I could talk with the subjects of my Lives and enjoy their company every day.” Samuel Johnson later echoed that sentiment, but extended it to include both the “virtues and the vices” from which a thoughtful reader might learn.

For six years now, for my own part, I’ve been breaking bread with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Not only am I glad to share his company in World War II, but I want others to, for the first time – since no historian has yet managed it. Moreover, in terms of lessons learned, I’m keen to show historians how for the most part they have wholly misunderstood FDR in his role as commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States. Far from being the laid-back, avuncular leader who left his generals to direct the war – as well his ally Winston Churchill – FDR was, I argue, the strategic mastermind and the patient military director or conductor of the Allies’ victory in World War II. As I’m seeking to narrate, he was almost constantly having to overrule his generals. And most importantly of all, he was having almost constantly to put down the strategic insurrections or rebellions of his crucial but junior ally and self-declared “lieutenant,” Winston Spencer Churchill.

Some historians – especially those bought up on Churchill’s self-laudatory six-volume war memoirs, which helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature – are reluctant to accept my somewhat radical biographical reconstruction of the war, and of FDR’s commanding role in its military prosecution. At my doctoral defense last spring, at Groningen University, one professor – a distinguished historian – noted that he, personally, was convinced by the forensic detail and authority of my revisionist approach. He posited that the reason Churchill and his supporters in the history profession had gotten away for so long with such a flawed account of the prime minister’s primacy in the direction of World War II might best be explained by what he called “structural” reasons.

How right he was – and is!

One such wall that the revisionist biographer must scale is patriotic pride. Another is accepted dogma. A third is the personal stake people may have in a given interpretation. A fourth is the lack of evidence to counter myth. And so on….

All revisionist work must encounter such “structural” defense, or counterreformation, as it might be called – in fact I’m sure it’s little different in other areas of knowledge. A new proposition in science, say, or paleontology, or biology, will rarely be welcomed without fierce opposition – especially where professional reputations are at stake. In history, too. But biography is, I think, on an especially contentious ground, structurally and culturally. Just as Plutarch extolled the pleasures of his subjects’ company, so too do aficionados and supporters of a revered individual – and who feel threatened by revisionism.

In reevaluating Franklin Roosevelt as the true architect and director of military operations in World War II, in other words, I am bound to upset those who are wedded to the notion that it was the U.S. generals, not the U.S. President, who were chiefly responsible for strategy and victory in World II, as well as the many who stand by Winston Churchill’s magisterial account of his own leadership in his 6-volume account, The Second World War – namely the vast, colorful canvas Churchill painted in which it was he, not FDR, who was the strategic military genius behind the winning of WWII. And the first line of the structuralists’ defense of such a hero will always be to attack the factual basis, or evidence being put forward, in the revisionist case.

There are two aspects of this that I would like briefly to examine today. The first relates to what Hans Renders, in his forthcoming collection of essays on modern biography, calls “the biographical turn.”[1]

Now in the late 1980s and early 1990s it became fashionable to decry the trend among modern biographers to write long, and in great forensic detail. As Lord Skidelsky put it, the “professionalization” of biography, especially among American university-led biographers, was leading to “works of scholarship rather than the imagination.” Janet Malcolm took up this claim in order to defend Ted Hughes, the husband of Sylvia Plath, in her 1994 investigation of biographers seeking to understand Plath, memorably accusing them of using “the apparatus of scholarship” to give “an appearance of bank-like scholarship and solidity, when the biography was nothing but a burglar, a busybody, a voyeur “simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail.” Even thirty years later, long after Hughes had died, Ms. Malcolm was trumpeting his postmortal right to silence, by pointing to the errors in Professor Jonathan Bate’s new biography, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life.

In seeking to understand the “professionalization” of biography in recent years I’ve argued in my essay “Biography as Corrective” in the Biographical Turn, that far from being an effort to conceal the nefarious motives of burglars and voyeurs, the length and forensic detail a modern biographer feels he or she has to exhibit are professionally necessary to overcome the structuralist walls put up by opponents – the very likes of Ms. Malcolm! Lytton Strachey may have been successful in mocking the myths of his Victorian models in Eminent Victorians, but his amusing, succinct irony, without forensic new research, was ultimately found to be insufficient in a new century of scientific investigation to change people’s minds. Biographers have thus been forced to resort to ever higher levels of scholarship if they are to succeed in correcting historians’ structuralist defense mechanisms.

It was for this reason that, for the second volume of my “FDR at War” trilogy, I was grateful to the Biografie Instituut at Groningen University for offering me the chance to develop and present my manuscript in part for the university’s Ph.D. program, in order to ensure that, with their help, it would pass scholarly muster once the book met the inevitable structuralist defenders of the faith: those reviewers, readers and aficionados who cannot accept that the U.S. generals in World War II were dangerously wrong in 1942 and 1943, or who cannot accept that Winston Churchill was not the strategic genius of World War II that he claimed to be, after president Roosevelt was no longer alive to contest their versions.

The second aspect I would like to consider here is the possible analogy between modern biography and our justice system.

In order to better understand how the serious, revisionist biographer operates today it may be helpful for us to see him or her as a prosecuting attorney. The biographer, in this analogy, assembles a case to present to the jury – i.e. the reader and reviewer. He or she will have to be a master of rhetoric, and of detail. For the structuralist defense will do everything possible to question and discount the evidence the biographer produces – since otherwise, the defense’s client may go to jail!

Revisionist biography, in other words – especially biography that seeks to correct history – is not only an exercise in good, Ciceronian argument, it must take account of the likely methods that the defenders, or opponents, in the case will employ. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” was the “dream team’s” famous mantra in the famous O.J. Simpson trial (referring to a blood-stained glove) – and it proved enough, together with efforts to question the factual evidence (DNA included) of the prosecuting attorney, Marcia Clark, to free the famous black footballer and broadcaster (though he was later convicted in civil court).

In another post I will look at the interesting way Commander in Chief, the second volume of my FDR trilogy, has fared before the jury since my PhD defense and publication.

For now, however, let me end by saying this. Revisionist biography – biography that has a moral agenda in contesting received opinion, and seeks to revise the current judgment of an individual in history, whether in the academy or in public – is a serious mission. Like the quality of our justice system as it is practiced, it has serious ramifications for the health of our society.

As proponents of the theory, justification and practice of biography in the modern world, members of the growing Biography Society have a noble purpose. In an age of Twitter, “professionalizing” biography is not a mask for burglary or voyeurism, pace Ms. Malcolm; it is a crucial, integral part of facing the many challenges – and ensuring the longevity – of the genre, today.

By Nigel Hamilton

Asked to write something for the 30th anniversary issue of Auto/Biography Studies on the theme “What Next?” I first balked, then wrote something. Was thanked and was then asked gently to get to the point, i.e. where we are going. So reluctantly I added more, looking ahead….

How, though, convey in a few words the rich field that is opening before our very eyes – but to which, as academics, we cannot do justice, since biography is still not accepted as its own interdisciplinary field in the academy?

I couldn’t – or only summarily.

One of the most promising and exciting areas of biographical study, I predict, though, will be the no-man’s land between biographical fact and fiction – a land that is continually increasing in mass.

I have not seen reliable statistics but I would wager that, over the past dozen years, the number of real-life, named figures in fiction has doubled, at the very least – and is now increasing exponentially. If we include screen (biopics), stage dramas (thesbios), as well as romans à clef, based-on real characters, (parabios) we could be talking revolution. As in Lin-Miranda’s latest play Hamilton which has been sensationally successful on Broadway and – like a boomerang – is now arcing back as a best-selling book.

Creative writing teachers are already fascinated by this shapeshifting, in a world where all kinds of boundaries are easing, even disappearing. But what are we, as students of biography, doing to teach this phenomenon, and the many questions it raises for biography?

What exactly, we ask ourselves, is really going on? Are novelists running out of characters to invent? Or is the public fascination with celebrities – at least in the West – such that novelists and their publishers are retreating, pour mieux sauter: reckoning that the stories biographers relate are stranger or stronger than fiction, and can be exploited in fiction, or dramatization? Are they trading, literally, on the dropping of names the public will recognize, and be curious about such fictionalized, dramatized stories – a first pivot or sales guarantee in their pocket?

Surely, though, it must go deeper than this?

One avenue of research the Société de Biographie might sponsor or encourage is the interviewing of fiction-writers – asking them directly: why are you choosing to present real people in your fiction so much today? Do you not see a possible danger, in that you may – if you are not a serious biographer – completely misunderstand, or may misconstrue the real life of the individual you portray? How do you think this will impact our culture and society? (For example, Hilary Mantel, in Wolf Hall, her fictional portrait of Thomas Cromwell, the chief of staff to King Henry VIII.) Do you even care, if it allows you to create an artistic masterpiece? (And be paid better, in the process, for having chosen a celebrity.) What exactly causes you to take that risk today?

I am no novelist, so am unwilling to guess. Nevertheless I love reading fiction – especially as an antidote, even escape, from my clinical study of real lives. So I find myself intrigued – unwilling to be too judgmental as a biographer, or biographer trained as an historian. When I read stories or accounts of prominent novels’ backstories in a newspaper – especially where the subjects are, or were, real people – I find myself intrigued.

One such article appeared this week in the New York Times. It was titled (in the print edition) “Childhood Fixation Becomes a Novel,” and its subtitle was “Emma Cline’s Manson Obsession.”

Emma is all of 27. Her debut novel is The Girls. Interviewed by Alexandra Alter, Ms. Cline said she traces her obsession back to the age of 7, when her parents used to drive her past San Quentin State Prison, where Charles Manson is still incarcerated. “That’s Manson’s House,” they’d say.

True to the tide of feminism and postfeminism sweeping our culture these past five decades, Emma was more curious about Manson’s “willing executioners” – his female acolytes – than about the psychopathic cult leader himself. “I felt everyone had heard enough of that story,” she told Ms. Alter. The monster’s “accomplices and devotees seemed like footnotes in his story,” she protested. She had lived in a small, commune-like family herself, with seven siblings – “extremely chaotic and feral,” as she put it. After failing to make much headway as an actress, she went to Columbia University’s MFA creative writing program – and The Girls was the result, garnering a million-dollar advance and screen rights sold on the way.

I, of course, would like to know more about this aspect of invention (and Ms. Cline). Where, though, can I study the business of being a biographer, in the same way as Ms. Cline learned at Columbia to be a novelist? Why are there no similar schools and programs for aspiring biographers, fascinated by truth?

But back to the point: the way true-life stories or potential stories are becoming the go-to dinner for aspiring fiction writers. According to Ms. Alter of the New York Times, Emma Cline’s novel The Girls is “arriving in the middle of a new wave of Manson-themed entertainment” – with Mansons’ Lost Girls, a TV-drama broadcast only last February, and a forthcoming TV series called “Aquarius,” about a fictional detective investigating Manson…. Plus two feature films on Manson already in the works!

Most will rely on the work of real biographers of real people, such as Jeff Gunn’s 2013 Manson – or, in Miranda’s case, Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. How ironic, then, that Ms. Cline’s and Mr. Miranda’s productions will become the stuff of Columbia University MFA dissection, as time goes on – but no-one, in the academy, will be examining such translations in terms of biography and the quest for truth!

Why are we, who are devoted to biography and the study of real lives, not teaching this phenomenon from our standpoint, as guardians of the search for the true stories of our own and of others’ lives in our modern culture (however tough the search for truth)?

Where are colleges and universities in the bid not only to examine popular culture, but to preserve, if possible, certain aspects crucial to our humanity – to truth as opposed to myth (however seductive, interesting or artistic the myth)?

As I ended my short piece for Auto/Biography Studies: “In biography’s house there are many mansions. One day real students will, I hope, be encouraged to enter.”

Nigel Hamilton

Nigel Hamilton is author of Biography: A Brief History (2007), and How To Do Biography: A Primer (2008). Dr. Hamilton is Senior Fellow in the McCormack Graduate School, University of Massachusetts Boston.